Lost and Found
by Maxiekat
Summary: Sam gets an early morning wake-up call from Quorra and together they contemplate the sunrise and what they should do now that they've escaped the grid. One Shot. COMPLETE


Note: I don't own _Tron Legacy_. Just a little something I had to get out of my system after watching the movie.

**Lost and Found**

"Quorra, it's early."

"I know, Sam Flynn."

"Sam. It's just Sam."

She smiled. "I know, _Sam_," she said, obviously humoring him. He couldn't help but grin back – he had smiled more in the last week than he had in his entire existence. He'd found and lost his father in the span of one night, but somehow that loss brought some much needed light into his dark world. It was funny how life worked sometimes.

Quorra was sitting with her legs crossed on the worn wood floor of his apartment, aka shipping container, aka his way of giving the finger to everything that his father's wealth stood for. The unexpected addition of Quorra into his life made him think it was time to spring for a shipping container addition or maybe swallow his pride and move into something where the walls were a little less, well, corrugated. Marv had no problem with the place, but dog standards tended to be a little more lenient than girl standards, even if this particular girl wasn't technically human.

She had the heavy rolling door wide open, flooding the small space with sunlight and disturbing his futile attempt at sleeping in. He had to admit, the view was beautiful - the sun glinting off the water, the way the rays filtered through the bridge, the faint traces of pink burning off as the sky became a vivid blue - it was just that it was a view he was not used to seeing so early in the morning and he wasn't sure he wanted to get used to it.

He yawned, stretching the kinks out of his back and neck, cursing himself for falling asleep on the couch yet again without first pulling it out into a bed. It was a bad habit, one that usually seemed like a good idea at the time but he always wound up regretting when he woke up with what felt like a hangover, and there was nothing worse than a hangover that you didn't properly earn.

At first, he was going to do the chivalrous thing and give Quorra his bed, then he realized just what a piece of shit his sleeper sofa was. So he instead got her a state-of-the-art air mattress that turned out to be the most comfortable piece of furniture in the whole damn apartment. He'd caught Marv curled up on it the other day, abandoning his doggy bed for comfier pastures.

Of course, with her circuits or whatever being overloaded every five seconds with some new tidbit of information, Quorra wasn't exactly getting the doctor recommended eight hours of sleep a night and the dog was getting more use out of the air mattress than she was. She wanted to know about everything and he was starting to feel like the worst person in the world that she could have been stuck with to show her this new and exciting world.

"You didn't get it right," she said, gazing out the door, the usual look on her face – a mix of awe and contentment.

"Excuse me?"

"The sun," she said simply.

He raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I didn't?"

"Well, you did but there is so much more to it." She sighed and he knew she was taking in the sight in front of her, processing it.

"I'm not exactly a poet, Quorra." Sam laughed, running his hand through his sleep-mussed hair as he slowly made his way over to where she was sitting.

"I know that, Sam Flynn." She looked up at him, her brow furrowing. "You are … what is your function again?"

He fidgeted with the memory card that hung around his neck and said quietly, "still working on that one." He sat on the floor next to her, his shoulder brushing against hers. "Anyway, about the sun …"

She nodded.

"Sometimes there are no words, no easy way to explain something so …"

"Beautiful." She said it like it was a breath, an exhale, barely a word.

He nodded and she tilted her head at him, studying him, smiling. He grinned back, thinking about what it must be like to see the world through her eyes. He looked out at the view and saw the pain and loss and disappointment that lurked behind the pretty picture. Quorra looked and saw beauty and promise and wonderment.

He had a feeling the early morning wake-up call was his fault. Yesterday, he'd taken Quorra with him to his dad's arcade. It had been so early that the sun wasn't even up yet and if felt like they were the only people in the whole city who were awake, his Ducati given free reign of the empty streets. Normally, he would have waited, but he'd had a breakthrough the night before, his first real concrete idea on how to handle everything that had gone down since Alan had come to him a week ago, holding an ancient pager and tossing him that set of keys. He couldn't rest until he'd uploaded the grid onto the memory card he now wore, that vast world reduced to a chip smaller than any technology his dad could have dreamt of back in '89. Wearing it both terrified him and comforted him at the same time.

After he'd finished what he'd gone there to do, showing Quorra the sunrise from the back of his bike seemed like the perfect way to close one chapter on his life and start another. To say she loved it was an understatement.

"You said you are still working on it," Quorra said, breaking into his thoughts.

"Huh?"

"Your function – you said you were working on it. Is that what you spoke to Alan Bradley about yesterday?"

Sam looked up at the tower that loomed behind bridge and cast a shadow on everything surrounding it – Encom. His past, present and future. He loved the building because his mom designed it and he hated it because it had taken his dad away from him.

"Yeah," he said. "I figured Alan should know first."

"Know what first?" she asked, just like he knew she would. Sam was getting used to the constant questions, or at least he was trying to. Patience was a virtue countless people in his life – grandparents, Alan and Lora, teachers, instructors – had tried to drill into his thick skull, but he'd managed to evade their best efforts.

Sam stood up and stepped outside, kicking a stone that was in his path, watching as it skirted across the water, sinking after a couple jumps. "The ultimate prank - take over Encom." He motioned to the building that he'd leapt off of a week ago. Next time he walked through those doors, chances are he wouldn't need to post bail an hour or two later. "My dad would like that."

"He would," she said softly and Sam knew that if anyone knew what his dad would have wanted, it was Quorra. "He would like that very much."

"I'll probably screw it up," he admitted.

"More than likely."

"Hey!" He looked over his shoulder, she was still sitting on the floor, biting her lip to keep from laughing. "I was joking."

"So was I."

"I just figured that in order to change the world, I need to actually be part of the world for a change." He sat back down, tilting his head up, eyes closed, letting the warmth of the sun wash over him. After coming back from the grid, he vowed to never take that warmth for granted again.

"He talked about you all the time," Quorra said. "He loved you very much."

_Loved_. Past tense. The way she said it, the finality of it, tore at his heart, but he kept his face blank. He'd said goodbye in his mind years ago, stopped looking out that front window, waiting for his dad to pull up in front of the house on his Ducati like nothing had happened, like time hadn't moved on without him.

He pulled the chain over his head and held the chip in his palm. He couldn't help but wonder …

"Sam, I don't think …"

"But you don't know either," he interrupted before she could finish her thought. "I wrote him off once before and look what happened."

"But that was different." She shook her head, her eyes full of pain. He knew she felt his dad's loss just as keenly as he did – maybe more so. Kevin Flynn had been a mentor, savior and friend to her for who knows how many cycles. Having him torn away so suddenly, so violently, had to have left a part of her broken.

Sam held out his hand, the memory card glinting in the sunlight. "This is something you and I need to figure out together." He nodded toward the skyline and the building towering over it. "Damn place has to be good for something."

Quorra squared her shoulders, a determined look on her face. He half expected her to salute. "When do we get started?"

Sam gave her a crooked grin. "Well, since we're already up …"


End file.
